When I left him, I told him nothing about my plans to try to get his plea bargain revoked. The odds of success are low, and the process could take a long time. But if Dad actually goes to the penitentiary, my mother will go mad. My cold assessment is that he will be transferred to Parchman, and that my best—and probably only—hope of getting him released before he dies there is to prove that someone else murdered Viola. And I don’t know how I can do that when the full resources of the FBI have proved insufficient to find and capture Snake Knox.

It took switching from gin to scotch to have my epiphany. After this additional chemical assault on my normal thought processes . . . I saw to the bottom of my father’s soul. Was alcohol the lantern that allowed me to see what I had failed to while I listened to Dad through the wire mesh screen of Billy Byrd’s jail? Maybe whisky was only the catalyst that shoved me out of my own way. In any case, I now understand something I did not before, and like anyone else who’s had his last illusion torn away . . . I want it back.

Dad didn’t condemn himself to prison because he chose us over Viola—to remain with his wife and children rather than leave them for a mistress who loved him. If that had been his only crime, he would have put it behind him decades ago. Viola’s desperate plea to be saved had carried more within it than a desire to spend the rest of her life with Dad—a lot more. Back at the jail, as my father talked to me about God and atonement, there was a deeper knowledge in his eyes—a knowledge of himself with all self-delusion stripped away. What remained was the truth, and the burden of it was terrible. Dad was trying to tell me what he’d realized about himself while Shad told his parable in court, but he couldn’t find the words to carry the awful weight of his discovery. Here in my house, though, alone with my whisky in the rubble of my father’s decision, I have finally plumbed the well inside him.